NACIS 2024

Slip 'N Slide: Getting Funky with Open Source Slippy Maps 
Janice Kai Chen, The Washington Post
Don't get me wrong — I love a slick, modern slippy basemap (CartoDB Positron?? I owe you my life.) But I also love me some maximalism of 2000s internet...and sometimes I love a lot of pink...and sometimes I want lots of birds on my map. We can have it all! In this talk, we'll go through different ways to add a personal flair to your maps with MapLibre, an open source library for designing and publishing interactive web maps.

Making Animated Maps That are Interactive using Adobe Animate
Michael Cattell, The Pennsylvania State University
Adobe Animate is a way for cartographers to turn a static map into an animated map with interactive elements. In this talk, I walk through a workflow for bringing geospatial data into Animate, adding animations, and then adding web elements to allow users to play, pause, and click around the animation to learn more about the data. This allows for key messages to be highlighted and for map users to explore the data. The example used is an animated map of Amtrak’s long-distance route that highlights stations only served at night-time.

Map Animations with Design in Mind - Harnessing the Best Parts of Multiple Mapping Tools to Make Great Looking Animations
Jamie Robertson, Panthera
Getting a map animation to look exactly the way you want can be tricky–sometimes a single tool will do most of what you want, but compromises to your intended design are often made. By using the powerful Temporal Controller feature of QGIS to manage the data-driven aspects of the animation and Adobe Illustrator/MAPublisher to control the basemap and typography, its possible to have your cake and eat it too. With a fascinating dataset collected on the Olympic Peninsula, we'll explore how the process works, the important settings to make the various software packages to play nicely together, and the tips and tricks that will save you a lot of headaches on your next map animation project.

Blending Modes Demystified
Charles Preppernau, ESRI
Blending modes are a powerful tool for compositing layers in our mapping projects, but what exactly are they doing, and how do they work? What exactly is happening under the hood when you select modes like Exclusion or Vivid Light, and how can you as a cartographer take advantage of their behavior? This talk aims to provide an introduction and some reference materials for understanding how blending modes work, how you can use that knowledge in your cartography, and a demonstration of some interesting ways that some of the more obscure modes can be used.

Mapping with Satellite Data (Beyond Landsat and Sentinel-2) 
Robert Simmon, Self-Employed (TBD)
National and international scientific agencies like NASA, NOAA, and the ESA have been monitoring the Earth at a global scale for decades. The data they have collected include specialized measurements like land cover classification, ocean color, vegetation health, and solar energy absorbed at the Earth’s surface. Unfortunately, much of this data is rarely mapped, in part because it is stored and distributed in scientific formats that can be difficult or impossible to read with off the shelf tools. In this talk I will show how to use GDAL to extract data from Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) into formats readable by commonplace mapping software.

Messing Around with Voronoi Diagrams
Thomas Coughlin, Esri
In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions where each location within a region is closer to its associated point that to any other input point. As a beginner mapmaker participating in the #30DayMapChallenge, one of my greatest challenges was figuring out the possibilities of what maps I could make beyond choropleth and bivariate maps. I think Voronoi diagrams are great for novice mapmakers looking to add some simple spatial analysis to their mapmaking. Come hear about Voronoi diagrams in nature, some of my mapmaking projects with them, and how you can add them to your own maps with commercial and open-source software.